Asia

TOKYO, April 4 - Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and France's Areva have won an order to build Turkey's second nuclear power plant - a project that is expected to cost some $22bn, the Nikkei business daily said on Thursday, citing Japanese and Turkish sources.

Turkey's Energy and Natural Resources Ministry has informed the Japanese government and corporate officials of the decision to award the deal to build four pressurized water nuclear reactors with a combined capacity of about 4.5GW at Sinop on the Black Sea, the report said.

China is poised to make a dramatic intervention in Britain's energy future by offering to invest billions of pounds in building a series of new nuclear power stations.

Officials from China's nuclear industry have been in high-level talks with ministers and officials at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) this week about a plan that could eventually involve up to five different reactors being built at a total cost of £35bn.

It is not an easy game, it never has been. Turkey now seems to be closer to realizing its bid for its first nuclear power plant than ever before.

Some, however, argue the country may find itself far from this dream due to some unanticipated problems that may occur behind closed doors. But isn’t there a remedy to erase all lingering doubts about the planned plant?

China appears to be edging ahead in the international contest to build a new nuclear power station on Turkey’s Black Sea coast – a sign of how the ambitions of its nuclear companies are poised to reshape the global nuclear industry.

Beijing is not looking for government guarantees for the project and can supply its own financing, according to an Ankara official, pointing to China’s advantage in the race to build the reactor for Turkey.

SOFIA, March 28 (Reuters) - Bulgaria has abandoned plans to build the 2,000 megawatt Belene nuclear power plant on the Danube River and will construct a new gas power plant instead, Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said on Wednesday.

The Belene project has failed to attract serious foreign investors in the past three years after Germany's RWE pulled out in 2009 due to funding concerns.

The management of Bulgaria's NPP Kozloduy has required a certificate of quality of the metal, of which the two high pressure heaters recently installed at power units five and six are made. This has become clear from a statement of NPP Kozloduy CEO Alexander Nikolov. The two heaters cost 29 million euros.

The nuclear plant's management has sent letters to the manufacturer, OAO ZiO-Podolsk, and the supplier, Atomtoploproekt, in which they insist on being provided with extra information regarding the control on the parts' manufacturing.

Having spent five years combining its nuclear power, engineering and research enterprises into the single entity of Rosatom, the Russian government now sees privatisation of the firm as part of a plan for industrial modernisation.

Rosatom is just one of several vertically integrated state holding companies Russia established to "discourage the decline of the more intellectual sectors of national industry" in the post-Soviet era, wrote Vladimir Putin in the Vedomosti newspaper on 30 January.

FRANKFURT/DUESSELDORF, July 11 (Reuters) - Germany's cartel office said on Monday it would "closely" examine any investment by Gazprom in RWE after reports the weakened German utility was open to an investment by the Russian gas monopoly.

Essen-based RWE has been hit by loss-making gas contracts and weak power prices, and is also under threat from a German tax on nuclear fuel that came into effect this year.

European Union member state experts have agreed on a draft text for a new nuclear waste and spent fuel management directive that would allow permanent exports of waste from the EU under certain conditions.

Bulgarians "risk being cold" this winter if the government did not move forward with the Russian energy projects. This is what Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin said, off-the-record, to his Bulgarian counterpart, Boyko Borisov, during the summit in Gdansk in September, 2009. The tone of the sentence in question is not clear, we cannot judge if it was threatening enough, but obviously it seriously impressed Borisov in order for him to report it in a timely manner and for Putin’s words to find their place in the classified documents of the American diplomacy.